nicolai wallner

There’s no escaping New York. Ten minutes after arriving at Art Copenhagen on Sunday, we encountered our boss Paddy Johnson’s face in William Powhida’s “Cosmology” (2010), a zodiac chart dividing New York art world figures into destroyers, saints, and so forth, with captions describing their roles.

Our reader survey last month revealed just how many of our visitors self-identify as perverts. If you’re one of that sizeable minority, and you’re in Miami, there’s no excuse not to make your way over to Nicolai Wallner’s booth to catch sneaky glimpses at some 1% snatch with this floor mirror by Jeppe Hein- and yes, we’ve mentioned him three times today. Deal with it.

Buoyed by Wednesday's big rally on the stock market, Art Basel opened with bang. Crowds of VIPs arrived early, and without fail every dealer AFC talked to had made sales by early afternoon. “Sometimes things sell in the afternoon or in later days,” dealer Zach Feuer told us after explaining that he had sold work immediately upon the show's opening, “You just don't know. But we're doing well and I get the feeling other people are too.”

It’s very hard to comment on a list ranking anything — beer, Star Wars movies, or art world figures — without negotiating some serious sass fallout. When reading comments to the 2011 Power 100, published today by Art Review, I thought of tuning my ear by spending a few minutes listening to the trash talk that follows a competition on Drag Race. What would people have to say if Dasha Zhukova gave RuPaul a “bad girl” makeover? Or if Takashi Murakami could talk about how funky his chicken is? And who wouldn’t want to see Damien Hirst lip-sync to the Stacy Q song “Two of Hearts?”